Coping Mechanisms
by Lorata
Summary: It's the months before the 74th Hunger Games, and mentors Brutus and Lyme decide to blow off steam before crunch time in a decidedly immature fashion. Petra, Brutus' youngest Victor, doesn't understand why her mentor is acting like an idiot in front of witnesses, but Claudius has an idea. (prompt: Brutus & Lyme, competitive drinking)


Claudius didn't realize he'd fallen asleep until a knock at the door jolts him upright. He sits up straight, disconcerted as always by the overly plush furniture and too-soft blankets. Years since his victory and Claudius still can't quite shake the feeling that falling asleep in the Capitol means the Arena is upcoming, and he runs a hand through his hair and slaps the sides of his face as he pads to the door to open it.

Petra stands waiting outside, fingers tight on the handle of her cane. "We've been summoned," she says, and that's not a statement anyone wants to hear except there's no fever-flush to her cheeks or half-crazed light in her eyes so it can't actually be an invitation from Snow.

"Huh?" Claudius says, intelligently. Petra has changed into her sleep clothes, the soft, flowing and eminently stylish ones her stylist packs for the Capitol, and Claudius squints at the clock. He fell asleep around ten like an old man, and now it's after midnight. "Where?"

Petra steps back, her cane clicking against the smooth hard floor. "Apparently our mentors are causing a fuss in the communal lounge," she says dryly. "We're supposed to go collect them."

Claudius finds his shoes and shoves his feet inside, and here's hoping he's acceptable enough for wandering the halls of the Victor Complex because this is as good as it gets. Here's to Capitol sleepwear that always leaves you ready to get up and meet the cameras anytime, and the stupid floral conditioner means even his bedhead will settle after a few minutes. Lovely.

Petra has at least rebelled against the ribbons and fluff by choosing dark grey sleep pants and a light grey tunic over the nightgowns that no doubt make up the majority of the clothes in her drawers. She might be a Brutus girl with a head stuffed full of loyalty and proper behaviour but Claudius still doesn't know how she managed not to stab someone in the face the first time her stylist tried to offer her a lacy pink nightdress.

They walk for a while in silence, Claudius awkwardly restraining his strides in deference to both the height difference and Petra's difficulty walking at speed while trying not to make it obvious lest she knife him. They're not friends and never will be, five years between them and absolutely polar narratives: Claudius is a child-murdering, borderline kin-slayer and lone wolf narrative-traitor who disappeared to the Village to hide his unpopularity, Petra the blood-soaked nymphomaniac who smashed her way through an Arena meant for stronger, butcher tributes only to suffer tragic injury in the final moments. Petra is honour and nobility and Claudius practically breathes treason, and their mentors might be best friends and their older Victor-siblings too but not everything gets passed down.

Still, it's a long way up to the lounge, and Claudius likes silence when he's by himself but with Petra radiating disapproval next to him the elevator is going to start feeling oppressive pretty soon. "Do you know what's going on up there?" Claudius asks.

He's never been one for small talk, and the withering look Petra shoots him tells him she's not a fan of it, either. "A drinking contest, apparently," she says, and Petra will hang by her thumbs before she speaks ill of her mentor but that's definitely exasperation lacing her words. "They keep tying and insisting on another round." She rolls her eyes and drums her fingers against the smooth wood of her cane. "I'm guessing the Ones started it, Brutus says Dexter thinks it's funny to wind people up."

"Oh boy," Claudius mutters. Brutus and Lyme tend to keep things fairly tame when they're in the Capitol, at least by Village standards, but the addition of outside pressure is the one thing that turns both normally responsible mentors into post-Reaping dare-takers.

This was supposed to be a quiet photo shoot, a handful of Career mentors with their youngest Victors, in an attempt by the higher-ups to maintain the excitement and publicity following three Career wins in four years. The sixties had a similar spread following the run of Devon-Enobaria-Cashmere-Gloss-Finnick, with Cecelia from Eight and Rokia from Six being the odd ones out in their respective decades.

Lyme has been — off since losing Sloane last summer, retreating more to the Village and dragging Claudius up the mountain for sparring and camping and hunting, sitting in his music room and listening to him play without speaking for hours. As far as Claudius knows she hasn't gone out on the prowl for dates since the previous spring, even though on camera she's picture-perfect with the same sharp smile and careless gibes for the reporters. Maybe she needed an excuse to let loose and forget about dead kids for a while.

Claudius knows better than to say that to Petra, at least. She hasn't seen Brutus lose a tribute yet, though of course she will, and Claudius might not like her very much but that doesn't mean he's willing to drop a boulder on her head, either. Brutus and Lyme are both on the shortlist for mentoring this year, and in a few months things will start amping up for real. This might be the last chance for them to have fun with their fellow mentors before everything goes serious and each thought and action is devoted to making sure someone else's kid dies.

The raucous laughter and wordless hollering filter through the walls even before the elevator stops, and Claudius and Petra exchange looks. Petra pulls ahead and Claudius lets her, content to walk behind because he's competitive but not enough to engage the girl with a smashed and reconstructed knee and hip to a walking race, and that means she reaches the door first. It slides open at her approach with a quiet hiss, and Petra stops dead in the doorway, fast enough that Claudius nearly crashes into her.

Lyme and Brutus face each other in push-up position, shot glasses on the floor in front of them, staring each other down as they lower themselves down to the floor and then back up again. When their arms extend they shift weight to their left, pick up the glasses with their right and toss back the shot. That itself isn't memorable; Claudius has seen them do this before at the annual barbecue, one of the few times the mentors allow themselves to get silly. What's different this time is that instead of Devon or Misha manning the refills, sprinting forward to set down a new glass, the mentors from One are actually sitting on Lyme and Brutus' backs, and they lean forward to slosh fresh alcohol into the glass from above.

Claudius pinches his nose before he even registers the movement. "Boss," he bursts out. "What are you _doing_?"

"Winning," says Lyme without missing a beat. "Brutus is going to tap out any minute, I know it."

"Bullshit," Brutus shoots back. "You don't have the body mass, sweetheart. The liquor's going to hit you in a minute and ain't nothing you can do about it."

Claudius and Petra glance at each other again, and for once he wishes they were friends so they could engage in the kind of mental communication that some of the others have down. Petra is only two years out, which means she and Brutus will still have the unilateral top-down relationship for young Victors and their mentors. Claudius and Lyme have barely started to edge out of theirs into something more equitable, and that mostly due to their largely unspoken mutual treason. Claudius might be able to shame Lyme into behaving when she does something spectacularly ridiculous with Brutus, but Petra isn't there yet.

"Sir if you don't get up and come to bed, I will personally drag you there myself," Petra explodes, face flushing red, and huh, apparently she is. "And then when my leg shatters it will be your fault and you will have to deal with my recovery _and_ you having lost your fucking mind."

Brutus falters on the push-up, his arms nearly buckling, and the District 1 mentor on his back lets out a delighted yowl. "Petra —" he warns, and Claudius stifles a laugh at the way he tries to inject his usual gruff authority into a tone that's well watered with copious amounts of alcohol and Lyme-needling.

"No!" Petra slams her cane on the ground in lieu of stomping her foot. "I did not kill ten tributes and smash my knee and pelvis and have to learn to walk all over again like a fucking baby to have to drag my mentor to bed at one in the morning." Without further ado, she uses her cane to knock both drinks out of reach, the glasses spiralling off to the side and the liquid pooling on the floor. "I'm going to bed. If another Avox wakes me up in an hour to tell me you're still here, I'll apologize personally to the president tomorrow for what happens after."

The Ones stand up and move away, grinning at Claudius, who shakes his head. "Boss," Claudius says, and the best part is that's all he needs. Lyme sighs, a long sound that turns into a groan, and she flops over onto her back for a moment, dragging her hands down her face, before hauling herself to her feet.

"Well, fuck," Brutus mutters, and he slaps away Lyme's solicitous offer of a hand up and stands up himself. "Guess I'd better go soothe the firecracker." He shakes his head, slaps both hands to the side of his face in a staccato rhythm, and just like that the intoxicated silliness disappears. "Thanks for coming to get us, kid. Sorry they woke you."

"It's fine," Claudius says, and Brutus lumbers off after Petra.

Lyme yawns until her jaw cracks, and she winces and rubs at her shoulder. "How you doing, D?" she asks, sounding much less sheepish, but then again Claudius has also seen her confined to the sofa with a bad case of the flu, so really, this isn't bad. "Not going to go berserk on me for shaming our glorious district in front of outsiders?"

Claudius snorts, but then he stops. It's weird, he and Petra aren't friends and never will be, and he doesn't understand her devotion to tradition while she can't fathom how he hasn't combusted out of sheer heresy already, but this he understands. The flash of panic in her eyes, the way her voice shook even as she lambasted the man who'd worked his hardest to keep her fed and hydrated in an Arena doing its best to pick her bones dry in the sun.

"I don't think that's it," Claudius says, and here's another new thing for him, disagreeing with Lyme out loud and actually being right. Maybe he is growing up. "You know how she idolizes him. It's hard to see your heroes and realize they're human. Not just flawed and fallible but —" He waves a hand. "Immature and stupid, sometimes."

"Hey you, watch yourself," Lyme says, cuffing him in the head before turning the gesture into a hair ruffle. "Nah, you're probably right. Petra does best when life is stable and everything makes sense. Brutus acting like an ass when we're supposed to be doing serious sponsor shit the whole time would shake her up a bit." She glances at Claudius and raises her eyebrows. "You seem to be fine."

Claudius first realized his mentor was a person with her own fears and failures before he'd even been out of the Arena and conscious a week, when he returned from his meeting with President Snow and found her exhausted and hurting, weighed down by the responsibility of everything she'd done to keep him safe, what that would mean for the future. He'd had to grapple with the fact that his survival could not be an entirely joyful thing for her, that she'd pitted herself against her mentor and doomed her next tribute to do it, and that moment — Nero's hand on her shoulder, Lyme's head in her hands — had done more to dismantle the unrealistic pedestal he'd placed her on since childhood than anything else.

To this day Lyme still doesn't know he saw her, and Claudius isn't sure he'll ever tell.

"I see you and Brutus acting like an ass all the time," Claudius says instead, and Lyme snorts and knocks their shoulders. "And I mean — you're both in this year, right? I figure whatever you need to do, you should do."

Lyme clicks her tongue. "Nothing gets past you, huh, kid," she says, and Claudius would feel proud for having read the situation right except her expression shadows and there's no triumph anywhere here. "I hadn't really thought about it, but yeah, probably. The first year back after a loss is hard, last year —" She hisses. "Last year almost killed me. I was this close —"

She doesn't finish her sentence, but the hairs prickle on the back of Claudius' neck. He thinks of promises half-spoken and unassuming code words with meanings heavy as the mountains, conversations with layers and a future where one day he and Lyme will pack up and leave this all behind to set the world on fire. He hadn't realized she'd come so near.

"Brutus deserves a night to be an ass, that's all I'm saying," Lyme says, and the odd tension in the air disappears as if she'd taken a stick to a spiderweb and torn it loose. "But you're right, Petra shouldn't have to see it. Not yet." She slings an arm around Claudius' shoulders and tugs him in against her side. "Look at you, all grown up."

"Not yet," Claudius says, cheeky, but he's half serious, too. Growing up is a terrifying concept, filled with expectations he's in no way ready for. "I'd still like my mentor to tuck me in at night."

Lyme laughs, and she stumbles a bit because the lighthearted mood might have been for show but the amount of booze sitting in her system definitely wasn't. "Sure thing, kid," she says. "If you're good I'll even read you a bedtime story."

Brutus and Petra are in the lounge area when Claudius and Lyme make it in, sitting on the couch and speaking in low tones. Brutus has his hand on the back of Petra's head, resting solid and heavy, and colour still blotches Petra's face but she no longer looks like she's about to spit daggers. Claudius leaves them to it, veers around and takes the long way to his room, Lyme following behind.

She actually does tuck him in, is the funny part, and Claudius grins in the dark as he drifts to sleep. The next morning he rises early and asks the food replicator to whip up an approximation of Emory's classic hangover remedy with a caffeine chaser. He places the tall glasses at Lyme and Brutus' spots at the table, then grabs his shoes to hit the inside track for an early run.


End file.
